


And the Lowly Beasts Around Him Stood

by JustOnlyGinger



Category: Original Work
Genre: Alternate Universe, Brainwashing, Cults, Hero Worship, M/M, Magical Realism, Necromancy, Road Trips
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-12-29
Updated: 2018-10-09
Packaged: 2019-02-23 18:56:40
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 14,994
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13196466
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JustOnlyGinger/pseuds/JustOnlyGinger
Summary: A vaguely Texan folk-musician-turned-revival-preacher uses his charisma for evil.





	1. The Sheep With Curly Horns

Being invited into the Master's private quarters is a great privilege. Dane knows this, and yet he's nervous, on edge, unsure what to expect. What could Jim possibly have to say to him, after all? He's been here two weeks, hasn't called attention to himself, worn the robes without complaining, gotten up when the bells chime at 5:30 in the morning, attended all the sermons and prayer circles and tea ceremonies and 'demonstrations' in the garden. He hasn't shared anything of himself, hasn't offered any observations or personal anecdotes, hasn't petitioned the Master for any special dispensations. He's surprised Jim even knows he exists, but Jim has to know everything. That's how this works, right, why he's qualified to call himself the Master, to stand on a raised platform, elevated above his fellow man and conducting divine wisdom straight down from Heaven itself. Well, obviously that part's bullshit, but if nothing else, Jim's got some decent business acumen. Knows how to market himself. Dane's not usually taken in by that brand of clean-cut well-spoken Southern-gentleman charisma, but even he has to admit it. There's a reason Jim has all these eyes on him, all these lesser beings kneeling at his feet.

Jim's suite, in a small whitewashed clapboard cottage on the edge of the property, is sparsely furnished but positively opulent compared to the windowless cell Dane shares with his 'prayer partner', the guy who'd had the room to himself before he showed up. His de facto roommate is decent enough, quiet and tidy and all-around pretty normal apart from the fact that he's missing an arm and is just about tall enough to qualify as a circus sideshow giant.

In the kitchenette, which is anonymous and unintimidating and done up in white tile and slightly less white Formica, Dane sits down in a straight-backed wooden chair while Jim takes a pitcher of iced tea out of the aerodynamic silver-scrolled 1950s refrigerator and pours them both a glass. Dane sips cautiously, realizes he's thirsty, takes a grateful gulp. It's not the iced tea he's used to, made from pale brown crystals dissolved in tap water, but some weird astringent brew laced with sweet fruit and honey and an array of unnameable spices. He drinks, and Jim smiles and taps his fingers soundlessly on the tabletop, and for a while neither of them says anything.

“So, what?” Dane says, after he judges the silence to have gone on too long. “Are you going to give me some advice? What do I need to do?”

“Nothing in particular. I just required the pleasure of your company.” Jim's smile turns into a grin, hard and white and impossibly radiant, every recognizable outline in the room- tables, chairs, stove, refrigerator-- subsumed by the sunlight reflecting off his finely polished teeth. “I like to speak privately with new initiates, in an informal setting. Have a bit of a back-and-forth, see how they're getting along.”

“Yeah.” Dane takes another gulp of tea, notices that his hands have started shaking. “I'm getting along fine.”

“I'm glad to hear that.” Jim reaches a hand across the table and rests it on Dane's shoulder; it's warmer and heavier than Dane would've expected, too heavy for him to shrug off, and he feels warm all over for some reason. Fever-warm, sweating, trembling, his heart burning in his chest, his vision starting to blur at the edges but it doesn't matter because he can see Jim, Jim is the only thing that matters, Jim is the center of the whole wonderfully funny and irrelevant universe, and Jim is moving closer until he's the only thing Dane can see. At some point Dane realizes he's no longer sitting in the kitchen chair but lying on a bed, on a very deep fluffy mattress with some kind of faux-fur throw wrapped around him, and he looks down and is astonished at the glowing whiteness of his own skin. He's naked, or maybe just seeing through his clothes, and he sees through his skin and the muscles underneath the skin and the bones underneath the muscles and deep in the most hidden part of him is his actual immortal soul, and it's this small blue thing like a hurricane on a TV weather map, whirling and pulsing with light. Love flowing out of him, love flowing in, it doesn't matter, because Jim is here with him and Jim loves him and both directions are the same.

Dane comes to, eventually, in his own bed in his own room; well, more like a pantry, with no windows and walls covered in mostly empty shelves and two beat-up old mattresses on the floor. His prayer partner, a man whose actual legal name is apparently Ivy, is asleep on the other one, a moth-eaten wool blanket pulled up over his head. Dane slowly realizes that his head is killing him, that something about being shown his own soul and the nature of love and eternity and the oneness of all things gives you a hell of a hangover. He concentrates very hard on his breath: in, out, in, out, in-out-in, no that's not right, slower...

Ivy rolls over, then sits up, blinking and stretching his arm over his head. He looks at Dane as if he recognizes the wretched state he's in, as if he knows exactly what's going on. Dane wants to speak, to beg Ivy to come closer, to hold him, to pull him close with that one strong arm and rock him against his sturdy chest. Dane's come undone, is as lost as a child without someone to pull him back down to earth. Ivy keeps looking at him, and Dane realizes that he's whimpering and he's probably been doing that for a while, maybe since he woke up, and he has no way of knowing how long ago that was.

“Ivy...” Dane finally manages to say his name, and Ivy seems to intuit what he wants from those two simple syllables. He lies down in Dane's bed, throws his arm around him, tucks his head against Dane's shoulder and breathes his long even breaths, slowly, calmly, endlessly.

Dane finally falls asleep, after what seems like an eternity of listening to Ivy's peaceful breathing. It's a soothing sound, really, seems to fill the air around it, to reverberate through every molecule in Dane's body like the ringing of the cosmic Om. It occurs to him on waking the next morning that Jim's acid-trip tea is in part responsible for his snuggling up to Ivy in the night, that otherwise he wouldn't have been quite so affectionate with this guy who, after all, he barely knows. They've chanted affirmations together, helped each other memorize long nonsensical screeds for Jim's various ceremonies, have spent a great deal of time just sitting in silence, side by side, pretending to be meditating. Well, Dane was pretending, for all he knows Ivy actually does attain some kind of enlightenment; he sits still enough, appears to be absolutely dead to the world until the chimes of the alarm sound calling him back to attention.

Anyway, Dane figures he shouldn't be embarrassed by what he did last night, although he hopes that all he did with Ivy was cuddle. Not that Ivy's not a good-looking guy in his intimidatingly massive way, but Dane's really trying to be less of a slut, which he figured would go well with this whole spirituality thing. He doesn't want to throw himself on the big guy's mercy, especially since he has no idea how Ivy would take it; though, judging by how prepared he was to nuzzle up next to Dane and throw an arm around him, he might not be so stringently heterosexual himself. He's returned to his own thin mattress on the floor at this point, and Dane watches him, absently notes his shapes and colors, the way it's kind of pretty how his dark hair curls on the back of his freckled white neck. He's thrown the blanket off, is naked except for a pair of weird button-fly underpants that look like something an old-fashioned wrestler might wear. They're always in their underwear, aren't allowed any other clothes besides the heavy synthetic yellow robes that manage to somehow be impractically restricting and comically voluminous at the same time, that Dane will take any excuse to strip out of.

“Good morning,” he says, when he notices Ivy starting to stir, to twitch his shoulders and stretch his arm and roll over onto his back. Ivy nods at him by way of greeting; never one to waste words. It's still early, at least half an hour before the morning alarm goes off, and Ivy looks well-rested as always. Dane envies him his apparently untroubled sleep, hasn't been able to sleep through the night like that at least since he was an infant and probably not even then. 

“Last night, did I...”

“You needed help going to sleep.” Ivy blinks, straight-faced, betrays no discomfort or embarrassment. 

“I always do. I mean, thanks, it was nice of you to...” Ivy nods, curtly, then stands up and starts putting on his robes.

Dane goes about his business, as usual, doesn't allow himself to think of his afternoon with Jim or the overtures he'd made toward Ivy. There's more chanting, more meditation, more prayer assemblies and tending crops in the fields and orchards, and each night Dane returns to the tiny pantry-room he shares with the largest man he's ever seen, and takes off his robe and settles down on his thin crackly mattress and waits for Ivy to come in from wherever he's been. His extracurricular duties are still a mystery to Dane, and they still don't talk much, but every once in a while Dane wonders what it would be like to climb into Ivy's bed in the middle of the night and rub up next to him until his huge cock gets hard and probably even more huge, to take it in both hands and suck and lick around on it for a while and then maybe stroke it between his thighs until Ivy comes; Dane doesn't think he could take something that big up his ass, but he suspects he'd be willing to try.

Sometimes Ivy talks in his sleep, moaning and grunting and muttering about a feathered serpent and other things that Dane can't make any sense of, strings of apparently meaningless words with a vaguely celestial bent, something about the sky and the stars and the domain of the Mother Goddess, which of course weirds Dane out because this whole undertaking is vaguely supposed to be Christian. It's actually pretty agnostic around here, most of the prayers and songs are of the secular “love thy neighbor and do good works” variety; insipid Sunday-school stuff, pretty meaningless and boring when you get right down to it.

One weird thing that's happened since he came here: he doesn't dream anymore, or probably he does but he very rarely remembers his dreams. He used to, he had all the usual dreams everyone has, falling and hiding and running from monsters and losing teeth, but he's lived on the compound for about two months now (has it really been that long) and in all that time he can't recall a single dream. Maybe they're all being rerouted into Ivy's brain instead, maybe Ivy is some kind of lightning rod for psychic energy; he's so sturdy and imperturbable, he can take all of Dane's various burdens onto his huge and slightly cockeyed shoulders. Dane continues to be privately grateful for him, to be comforted by his presence, reassured by the sight and sounds of his massive body settling as he lies in bed at night. He can close his eyes right now and see every detail: Ivy's broad scarred back, the threadbare waistband of his undershorts. The taut curve of his ass under the thin-worn fabric, the dark splotchy moles and fine hairs on the backs of his thighs.

There are Recreation Hours in the afternoon, short periods of unstructured time to be spent in private reflection or socialization or in one of several summer-camp-style arts 'n' crafts sessions, and Dane attends a mandala-drawing workshop led by a small weird guy who seems to function as Jim's man Friday, or secretary or spiritual advisor or all of the above. His name is Vivian, but he insists that the initiates call him Sparrow, which Dane is happy enough to go along with as long as no one tries to re-christen him with some hopelessly doofy New Age sobriquet. 'Sparrow' calls everyone 'dear' and is constantly pouring himself drams of a dark liquid that Dane suspects isn't tea from a small copper teapot he keeps with him at all times. Dane's also seen him giving instruction in some kind of martial arts involving vigorous wielding of blunt wooden objects, and a kind of wrestling where you're not allowed to use your arms. If Ivy ever competed in that, he'd probably defeat all comers. Dane finds himself thinking of Ivy instead of living in the moment and connecting to his physical self or whatever the fuck it is he's supposed to be doing right now. He's not obsessed, of course not, it's just that he sees the guy's mostly-naked body all the time and it's the kind of body that leaves an impression. Classically proportioned, muscle on top of muscle, even the stump of his missing left arm is somehow sleek and shapely. He looks almost as if he were meant to have only one arm, as if whatever god Jim believes in designed him that way.

Vivian's roaming among the tables now, murmuring like an elementary-school art teacher, praising each sleepwalker as he passes, the pencils moving in hypnotic circles, all eyes downcast in concentration, nobody looking up, nobody wondering where they are, all of them under a subtle but unbreakable spell. Vivian pats Dane's shoulder, and Dane hardly even notices. His pencil point is moving in whorls and figure-eights, almost entirely without his influence.

At morning meeting, he mouths the words of the daily prayer, holding Ivy's hand; the guy on Ivy's other side is holding onto his shoulder, so there's no break in the circle, praying hands clasped together, Ivy's the only one missing but it doesn't matter as long as the circle is complete, and Jim at the center with his arms raised to heaven or whatever is floating above their heads, that mystery that can never be known, a miracle they don't deserve, something utterly beyond the understanding of mere mortals. Dane doesn't say the words out loud, but his lips move around them. It's the same prayer they've all been saying for months, he knows it by heart but doesn't know if he could repeat it without stumbling, without stuttering, without laughing. He repeats it but doesn't know if he believes.

O lord, I am weary, I am restless, I am blinded with idolatry. Cure me of my afflictions, that I may better serve thee, and become fulfilled in the course of my faithful service. Make my head clear, my heart light, my hands steady, that I may turn head heart and hands together to thy works, and may all creatures that live entreat thee for the same thing, and all creatures that live learn from thee how they best might serve. Amen.

Amen, he says, and he doesn't know what it means but he feels the word trembling on his tongue and maybe it is holy, maybe the spirit is in him after all, maybe all his doubt will leave him, rise heavily on beating wings and lift into the air and leave him so much lighter than he's ever been, light enough to lift into the air himself. Part of him knows it's all bullshit, and he's looking around the prayer circle trying to ascertain who else is pretty sure that it's all bullshit but everyone else looks picture-perfectly devout, downcast eyes and neatly clasped hands, everyone else looks as solemnly contented as sleepwalkers and there are more prayers but Dane can't stop thinking about that holy trinity, the head and the heart and the hands.

His head is full of misgivings and misdirections, lies and false reassurances and desperation. His heart is heavy in his chest, he feels the weight of it there constantly, feels it sinking like a stone. He will never be what Jim wants him to be, what he knows Ivy is, and he looks over at Ivy and for just about half a second Ivy looks back at him and it almost seems like he's smiling, with just one corner of his mouth but in that fraction of a second Dane's heart lifts joyously. In that moment Dane's head is blindingly clear, his heart light as air, his hands steady, his skin glowing with impossible warmth where it touches Ivy's. Idolatry, he thinks. He's just as much an idolator as he's always been.

He can't keep the prayer in his head, can't convince himself there's anything sacred about where he is or what he's doing. He's hungry and uncomfortable most of the time, the stupid robes he has to wear are heavy and sweaty when it's warm out and drafty when it's cold and how anyone is supposed to live like this for any length of time he can't imagine and yet here they all are, Jim and his acolytes. Jim doesn't wear the robe, has a fancy wardrobe of his own, any number of suits and work shirts and ties and suspenders and once in a while a pair of jeans which is interesting, it's kind of hot to see a man wear jeans when he wears nicely pressed suit trousers most of the time and Dane isn't attracted to Jim per se but there's something about him that draws the eye. He looks good in clothes, like a catalogue model, a poised blonde mannequin, like he's meant to sell Oxford shirts and braided leather belts instead of salvation.

It's starting to honestly drive Dane nuts to sleep so close to Ivy every night, and yet to be no closer to answering the question he poses; namely, does he want to fuck Dane, can he be persuaded to, can they maybe escape this hellhole together, ride off into the sunset like it's the Old West, and he can just imagine Ivy, his great impassive brow shielded by a wide-brimmed hat, a week's growth of stubble on his high sharp cheeks, all that tv-movie shit. Ivy astride a spotted horse, dust and sunset glow and hallucinatory clouds. Balanced perfectly despite his missing arm. He'd make the perfect hero for a Western, if you think about it. Lonesome, taciturn, with an innate sense of justice and a weird kind of patience, a grudging sense of duty towards his lessers. Like Dane. He sleeps in the same room as Ivy but after that one night he doesn't have the nerve to approach him, and maybe he's hoping that Ivy will pick up on his pheromones or something, sense his attraction on a subatomic level and make a move of his own.

Dane's at tea break in the communal kitchen one gray rainy day, making himself a hot chocolate and trying to convince himself that this whole experiment isn't totally doomed, when old Vivian appears out of nowhere and starts polishing the teakettle. He whistles, fills it with water, sets it down on the burner and starts poking through the cupboards for a mug, and Dane watches him, trying to ascertain if he really is as harmless as he seems.

“Hello there, dear,” Vivian says, appearing to notice him for the first time. He puts two sachets of camomile tea in his cup, upends the mostly empty container of honey over it. “You're a sight for sore eyes, do you know that? Goodness, but I could do with some company, I've been in the library all morning researching...” Just what he's been researching, he doesn't say, seems to all at once think better of letting that slip.

“Yeah,” Dane says, because he figures he should say something, because he's probably starting to seem weird even among these weirdos, keeping to himself so much. “Um... yeah, that sounds interesting though. I didn't know there was a library here.”

“A very small one, truth be told. All Jim's reference materials are in there, it's in one of the back rooms of his barn. Not an ideal place for books, but we do the best we can with what we have. Could do with more climate control, we're trying to raise money for proper storage for many of these archives...” Vivian rattles on and on about Jim's priceless stores of books and scrolls and photographs... “primary sources” he calls them, though he's vague as to their exact content, and Dane listens and sits in a folding chair and drinks his hot chocolate and watches raindrops slide down the window, monotonous and hypnotic as Vivian's voice, and the room is warm and steamy and he feels weirdly faint, sort of floaty, like he's hovering above his own body.

He feels almost as messed up as he did that night (or was it afternoon) in Jim's private quarters, when he's pretty sure he ended up in the great man's bed. Still not totally sure how he should feel about that; maybe it's flattering, for Jim to pay that kind of attention to him. Maybe it's just an opportunistic predator feeding on easy prey. Dane never wanted to be that easy, though he's found himself going along with a lot of shit in his life, just because it seemed easier than the alternative and it was really no skin off his nose anyway.

“So you've like... known Jim for a long time, right?”

“Well, that depends, dear. I've known him for close to five years now, but I feel as though... well, of course he's the sort of person one can never really know, isn't that true? He has so many undiscovered facets, no matter how many you've seen there are always more that you haven't... he's so incredibly complex, he contains so much, but he wasn't always like that. He was just like us once, a long time ago. He needed to be shepherded along the path to truth, and we're lucky we have him to show us the way.” Dane tries to guess exactly how much of this is bullshit, but he can't really get a read on Vivian. Either everything he says or does is utterly insincere, or the opposite is true. He seems so arch, so mannered, so very... cultivated, like every little thing he does is part of the same seamless act, like he's playing a character so perfectly that he forgets it's not really who he is.

“Yeah, I'm not sure... I don't know if I'll ever know what the truth is.” Well, there you go, Dane thinks. Honest without incriminating himself, or so he hopes. He assumes anything he says to Vivian will make its way back to Jim.

“Well. None of us know for sure, do we? We can only pray. Have faith, remain devout, know that at the very least you're on the right path.” Vivian winks at him as he stands up to put his teacup in the sink, and after he washes his dishes he leaves as mysteriously as he arrived and Dane is once more alone in this hallucinatory steam-filled room, glad at least to have a few minutes to himself although he wishes he didn't think quite so much. He's becoming paranoid, he's sure of it. Obviously Jim has some ulterior motive, and obviously Vivian is his right-hand man in this swindle, whatever it is, and maybe it's something to do with these mysterious archives. Precious documents, worth a lot of money maybe. Stolen art, medieval manuscripts, anything is possible.

Dane returns to his room to take a nap, his mind still churning with conspiracy theories, and Ivy's not there but there is a book lying on his bed as if recently dropped there, a field guide to edible plants that looks like it's about 70 years old. The creased cover, the painted binding, gilt letters, tissue paper over the color illustrations... Dane thumbs through it, feeling only slightly guilty that he's technically invading Ivy's privacy. When you think about it, the big guy's really a little too private; Dane would never have suspected him of having an interest in plant life, or in anything besides being stoic and taciturn. And laundry, he knows Ivy loves doing laundry. There's a basement room on the compound with a bank of washers and dryers and a shelf full of boxes of detergent and bottles of fabric softener, and Ivy's taken over the duty of washing his and Dane's robes and socks and underwear, making the holy pilgrimage every Saturday with the plastic hamper full of dirty clothes and returning them folded with almost neurotic neatness, the socks always right-side-out and nestled perfectly inside each other. Dane can't figure it, but there's nothing about what he can discern of Ivy's personality that does make sense.

The gardens slumber all that afternoon under a heavy rain, and Dane reads Ivy's book and lets his mind wander, imagines scenarios where he's a criminal mastermind putting together a heist team and Ivy's the hulking and hard-bitten but secretly very sensitive ex-con who knows everything there is to know about casino security. Or he's a deep-sea diver and Ivy's a selkie, and he convinces him to throw off the seal skin and come find a convenient rock ledge to roll around on. His fantasies get more and more outlandish, and he crawls under his blankets when it gets too cold to lie around on top of them in his underwear and then he figures while he's under here he might as well have a wank. He rubs around on the front of his shorts for a while, teasing himself, imagines it's Ivy's big warm hand cupping his growing erection.


	2. The Dove from the Rafters High

There are a couple of cop cars and an ambulance parked in the gravel driveway next to the community house, and lights are blinking but no sirens and Dane makes his way up the back stairs to his room and discovers that whatever's wrong is unfortunately wrong in his room or possibly in the hallway right outside it, because there are two cops and a guy in a windbreaker and rubber gloves who must be some kind of forensic investigator and they're all standing in the doorway and there's Ivy's body in his bed, not moving.

The cops are standing around talking, cracking jokes it sounds like, and they don't see Dane muscle in with the small amount of muscle he's capable of and brush past them from behind and they don't start grabbing for him until he's already crouching beside the bed, shaking Ivy's body, and he can tell from the cold and the stillness and the smell that there's nothing alive in there anymore, that all there is lying on the mattress is a loosely assembled series of molecules already starting to break down. He pulls the blanket off of Ivy and he's lying there like he's asleep with his underwear on and his robe folded under his head, and his eyelids look a little sunken and his skin looks a little pale but other than that nothing seems to be amiss.

“Shit, how did this happen?”

“Kid, come on... jeez, somebody get this kid out of here. Fucking arrest him if you have to, here--” One of the cops shoves Dane towards the other one and obviously there's nothing he can do but fight tooth and nail to return to Ivy's side even if at this point he's weeping over a cadaver. Weeping; weird, when did he start crying? He's actually trying to punch the cop holding his arm when Jim shows up, and that has a strange sudden calming effect, Jim hasn't even laid a hand on him but his aura or something permeates the room and Dane immediately stops fighting, lets the cop hustle him into the hallway where he leans against the wall and splays his hands on either side of it to keep himself from sliding to the floor because his legs have kind of stopped working at some point.

“He's dead. He's dead, oh god, he's dead.”

“Hush now, son, no need for all this carrying on.” Now he's sitting on the floor and Jim's hand is on his shoulder, and he's watching the cops trying to move Ivy's body. With a lot of grunting and swearing they manage to turn him onto his front, and the forensics guy or whoever he is pulls off Ivy's shorts like he's undressing a really large heavy mannequin, which doesn't creep Dane out as much as it should. It's kind of interesting, and now the guy's got a thermometer in one hand and he unwraps a condom and slips it over the long plastic probe and nudges it up Ivy's ass, more gently than any of them have treated his corpse so far, as if he thinks Ivy can still feel it.

“That's weird.”

“What?”

“He's running a fever.”

“The stiff's running a fever.” One of the cops laughs. “That's great.”

“What the fuck.” Dane struggles to his feet, fighting gravity and Jim's uncannily strong hands. “Did anyone even try to resuscitate him? Where's the paramedics?”

“Outside in the van,” Jim says. “It's too late now, they tried everything they could. I'm afraid he's gone, son.”

“He's not.” Dane finally succeeds in pushing Jim off him; he bursts back into the room, flings himself down next to Ivy's body on the mattress. He grasps at Ivy's shoulders, his hands skidding and sliding against the bare skin which for some reason is slick with sweat. He slaps and strikes Ivy, beats at his chest and shoulders, and suddenly a long horrible rattling sound issues from Ivy's open mouth and his jaws snap closed like a bear trap as he bolts upright in bed, scaring the shit out of pretty much everyone in the room, even the hardass medical examiner guy who looks like he hasn't slept in weeks. One of the cops leaps back, flinging his arms out crosswise like he's about to be attacked by a vampire, and Dane lets out a brief incongruous snort of laughter.

“Ivy.” More gnashing teeth and rolling eyes, and Dane's kind of concerned that Ivy's actually possessed or something, that Jim's weird snake-handling tent-revival magic has somehow made him into a living corpse, a decaying flesh puppet, a warning to the rest of them about what happens when you resist Jim's will.

“Ivy.” Dane slaps him across the face, and the cops are on both of them now, trying to drag them apart, and Dane doesn't know where Jim is anymore which can't be good, and Ivy rises from the bed with the serenity of a sleepwalker and pushes aside all the grabbing hands and jostling elbows and stands upright with his arm straight out at his side and his eyes closed and his head tilted towards the ceiling. “Don't touch him,” Dane hears himself shouting, and somehow the two of them manage to keep fighting, to batter everything out of their way, and they reach the hallway and the stairs and Dane loses everything to a reddish heat-haze of adrenaline until they're outside on the lawn and running like hell towards the woods at the northern edge of the property.

 

 

“There, now. See, there you are, you're coming around, aren't you? You've had a bit of a shock, but you'll be all right.” Dane swims up out of unconciousness, and his vision is still all wavery underwater light like when you look up at the sun from the bottom of a pool, but he can hear well enough, and he recognizes the gently tutting voice as Vivian's, Vivian nearby, bustling around him, straightening the bedcovers and fluffing the pillows, Vivian grasping his hand and leaning in and repeating more melodious reassurances, and Dane still can't figure out where he is or why he's here but Vivian's presence does set him at ease, something about his gentle voice and vague possibly fake English accent, just the general impression of sturdiness and psychological imperturbability, like he's never had an inconvenient negative emotion in his life. Certainly not a nervous breakdown, like the one Dane appears to have had, and he realizes at some point that his feet are wet and remembers running barefoot across the lawn, the feel of dew and clods of slippery grass, stumbling and almost falling and catching Ivy's arm to steady himself.

“Ivy.”

“Yes, yes, I know.” Vivian sounds appropriately solemn, but not morose. This is the natural order of things, death follows life, there's nothing anyone can do about it but bear sacred witness and honor the spirit of the departed one, and Dane tries to imitate Vivian's serenity but finds he's still close to having a nervous breakdown, his heart hammering at the back of his throat and his chest constricted and aching like he's having trouble drawing his breath, now he's lightheaded as well and Vivian keeps on talking, strokes his hair away from his face, it's getting kind of too long, long and floppy on the top in that 90s teen idol way which he sort of despises but it hasn't occurred to him to ask Jim where he can get his hair cut.

“You were his friend, weren't you? It's a hard thing, to lose someone like that.”

“He's not lost.” When Dane thinks about that, it isn't really true. Ivy is gone, whether or not he's actually dead. “I saw him, he ran into the woods, he's... well, he's probably lost in there by now. He didn't know where he was going, he doesn't have a great sense of direction, I have to... I should have... I tried to go with him, I should be there, he needs my help...”

“I'm sorry, I really am.”

“It was Jim. Jim did something. He'd be here now, if...” Dane struggles to lift his head, finds it's as heavy as a sack of rocks, that same feeling of solid objects shifting and sliding and cracking together. A headache, but not like anything he's ever experienced before. “Jim did something to me. My head hurts.” His voice is a weathered croak, and he's surprised Vivian can understand him.

“Settle down, now. Go back to sleep.” Vivian's stroking his hair again, which Dane doesn't actually mind, especially when those strangely smooth cool fingers brush across his forehead and he feels them drawing the pain out of him; he knows that can't really be what's happening, that Vivian doesn't have some kind of magical healing touch, but at this point he'll take whatever he can get, including harmless delusions. He closes his eyes and drifts off to sleep, and when he wakes again Vivian is still there, sitting in a chair beside his bed, reading a book.

“How are we feeling now? Better, I trust?”

“Yeah.” Dane struggles to sit up, but Vivian pushes him gently back down, both hands on his bare shoulders. “Thanks. I mean... thanks. How long have you been sitting here?”

“Don't bother about that. You know...” He hesitates, settling back down in his chair, opening the book on his knee. “You know, if you really can't live without your fellow, you should go after him, but be careful. He seems to me like the sort who's long since eliminated the need for human contact from his life.”

“He's not like that.” Dane's heart beats fiercely, his blood burns, his whole body strains and quivers with determination. He'll leave this place, he'll find Ivy, find him and show him that stunned and solitary wandering isn't the only life he's capable of having, that he isn't meant to be lonely after all. “Well, maybe he is, but I don't know it for sure. I have to find out.”

“Go after him, then. Follow him into the wilderness.” Vivian has a pencil in his hand now, his left hand, Dane had never noticed that he's left-handed or maybe ambidextrous like Jim, provided by God with the gift of mental balance, both hemispheres of his brain working in perfect harmony. “And there's something you can do for me as well. I was acquainted with a young man in my hometown, last I hear he's gotten himself mired in a truly untenable situation, one in which he can't be allowed to languish for much longer. I doubt he sees it that way, but if you were to liberate him...” Vivian rips out a page from his book, folds it several times and tucks it into Dane's hand, and Dane unfolds it, can see well enough now to make out an address, the name of a city, two baroque capitals indicating Vivian's home state.

“Go there, free the princess in the tower, but keep well clear of creature that's imprisoned him.”

“Okay.” This is loony, obviously, but Vivian's been nice to him, and it seems like the least Dane can do is play along, pretend he's willing to be sent on some kind of Arthurian quest by an unbalanced old man with a fake English accent. Vivian's got his own issues, and Dane's inclined to be understanding. Anyway he proves invaluable in Dane's escape, provides him with the keys to a rusting Volkswagen Golf parked in the back lot behind the dairy barn, and wouldn't you know it, the thing actually runs. Dane's instructed to leave it at another address Vivian writes down for him, and by lights-out at nine o'clock that night he's back on the road, dreaming of Ivy, doing his level best to tamp down his terror of the unknown.

Dane has maybe fifty bucks to his name, and he doesn't really start to panic until he's wasted about half of it driving in circles. Ivy can't have gotten far, but what if he didn't get far enough, what if he never made it out of the woods, metaphorically or literally, what if Jim actually did manage to kill him and he's lying there wrapped in a tarp at the bottom of the ravine, the possibilities are as numerous as they are depressing and all of them lead to Dane spinning his wheels out here alone until he's forced to suck some guy's dick for gas money, or worse, call Jim for help. He has the number in the basic but functional cellphone that Vivian also gave him, can summon Jim's voice in his ear with the press of a button, and as his first day of freedom sinks into despondent night he finds himself considering it.

Then, an actual real-life miracle, thank you God, Hallelujah and praise His holy name, he thinks it's a mirage at first but there in the lowering dusk trudging along the shoulder of the road is a massive man in a white t-shirt that glows like salvation in the hallucinatory purplish light. He carries a duffel bag over one shoulder, and the other shoulder is missing the arm that once depended from it. Dane slams the brakes so fast he nearly gets rear-ended, and the Golf swerves over and comes to berth safely amid a cloud of dust and candy wrappers a few yards ahead, right in the path of Ivy's pilgrimage, and he looks up and in the beam of the taillights it really is him, Dane's never seen anything so beautiful, Ivy wearing his undershirt and rubber flip-flops and a pair of shorts that look like he got them out of the lost and found at a gas station, and neither of them says anything until after Dane's manhandled him into the passenger seat and pulled the car back out onto the road.

“Where are we going?” Ivy asks him, once a couple of miles have gone by, and Dane's instinct is to reply that he doesn't know, he's never known, he's always been driving down some perfectly straight highway in the dark with no idea what he's actually headed towards, but then he remembers, and he fishes the little slip of paper out of his pocket and hands it to Ivy, who squints at it in the ghostly sodium light of the lamps that tower by the road.

“Le Claire, Iowa.”

“Yeah. I've never been there.” Obviously he hasn't, but he feels like it won't be hard to find, like now that he's not freaking out about losing Ivy anymore some kind of weird sudden sense of obligation toward the guy who took unexpected pity on him is propelling him towards it; the town in his imagination in a shining beacon, glass houses on a hillside, a gleaming Emerald City. As it turns out, a gas-station map is enough to guide their way, Ivy holding it open on his lap and interpreting, merge onto 280, keep heading east, and the sky is pitch-black with a hint of sunrise and this is the touchy part, cruising around the sleeping residential streets looking for the address on Vivian's piece of paper.

It's around 2 in the morning when they finally find a mailbox with the right number, on the outskirts of town next to what appears in the beam of the headlights to be some kind of old rock quarry, a deep and neatly tiered sandstone pit, black water at the bottom, and something about it creeps Dane the fuck out.

The house itself is decrepit and moldy and partially swathed in Tyvek on the outside and looks like a cross between a horror-movie set and a low-budget porno on the inside. The front door is unlocked and off-kilter, and in what probably used to be the living room is a single oval-backed chair, the upholstery dark with water damage, and a mattress on the floor made up with clean incongruous white sheets and surrounded by the heaped remains of someone's taxidermy projects, piles of skins and miscellaneous tails and paws and heads with fake glass eyes inserted where their real ones used to be. On the wall are more skins, mostly whitetail deer, and in the corner sits a mounted fisher cat on a piece of driftwood, lined up next to it a half dozen squirrel corpses and a pair of bloodstained rubber gloves. No human inhabitants are in evidence, and Dane would be perfectly happy to leave all these tormented animal spirits to their fucked-up purgatory and get the hell out of here, but he's still somehow afraid of looking like a pussy in front of Ivy, so he presses on.

“It's like Psycho,” he mutters, and Ivy glances back at him and quirks the corners of his mouth like he's not sure if that's a joke. “You know, the movie? The part where they're having tea, with all the stuffed birds?”

“Find the stairs,” Ivy says, and Dane's been looking, but all the closed doors lead to more mostly empty rooms, and closets full of dusty wool overcoats and ancient work boots. In the kitchen, which is jarringly un-horrifying, painted yellow with cheerful plaid curtains and well-scrubbed linoleum, he finally spots the tarpaulined doorway that conceals the basement stairs, a series of raw and rickety plywood slats that he descends one at a time, and he's not sure but he thinks he can hear singing. Someone's tipsy voice, high and hoarse and interspersed with laughter, and then another voice that he's pretty sure is just the first one answering itself.

“Hello?” he calls out, sounding a lot more authoritative than he feels. Pretend you're a cop in a TV crime drama, yeah, that works, pretend you have a gun and a legal right to be trespassing in whatever kind of hillbilly torture dungeon this is. “Anyone down here.” The singing stops, and Dane stumbles over the bottom step and reaches back and grabs Ivy's arm to steady himself.

“Hello?” The basement light is on, a single bare bulb dangling above a washer and dryer humming in cozy domestic unison, and on top of the two machines is sprawled a shirtless body, probably a man's with that long bony torso, all the ribs sticking out, and a pair of canvas work pants unzipped and hanging low on the narrow hips, and whoever it is has their arms crossed over their chest and their face buried in their arms, and probably this is what they've been sent here to find but Dane doesn't want to get any closer. There's something about this tableau that's just as unsettling in its own way as all the jumbled animal parts upstairs, and he knows if this person raises their head and looks at them he and Ivy won't be able to leave and pretend they didn't see whatever they've seen here tonight.

“What should we do?” he whispers, probably too loudly, and Ivy nods like that clarifies anything and nudges him forward, and he walks on shaking legs towards the greasy yellow circle of light that falls on the unknown person lounging on top of the washer and dryer, and she... a woman, Dane thinks, those are definitely tits, she finally looks up and he changes his mind again because the face makes him think masculine, sharp-pointed and hollow-cheeked in an androgynous sort of way but with a distinctly mannish jawline and what could either be the faint shadow of stubble or just bruises.

“Oh, hey.” Man's voice, unmistakable, but then Dane can't help wondering what's with the excess chest fat. Not very much of it, true, but they're soft-looking, those two little mounds, distinctly rounded with the nipples pointing upward, pretty much the opposite of how it looks when guys gain weight up there. “I'm not ready yet.”

“You're...” Dane has no idea what to say next and it's just now dawning on him how little he actually knows about this situation, like it would have been helpful if Vivian had given him a name or something, told him anything at all about who this guy they're stealing a kidnapping victim from actually is. He glances at Ivy, who's nodding like this is actually going well, and he can't really say that it isn't, so far they seem to be communicating. “You live here, right? What's... what's your name?”

“Noah.” He blinks, glances from Dane to Ivy and back again, wraps his arms around himself to cover his chest.

“You're not a woman,” Ivy points out, and Dane cringes but all Noah does is laugh. Off-balance, loud and hoarse, leaning forward and slapping his knee like he's never heard anything quite that hilarious.

“Nice one, Rain Man. Good times down on the funny farm, huh.”

“Funny farm?”

“Oh, beg your fucking pardon.”

“People don't say that anymore, do they?” Dane has no idea why he's arguing at this point, they should all be getting the hell out of here, but he doesn't know if he can convince Noah to move; or if he wants to, come to that. He's a little offended on Ivy's behalf, but just because this guy's a dick doesn't mean he deserves to be some rich old man's domestic rape slave or whatever it is the master of the house has been using him for. Noah shrugs, sways, looks like he's about to fall right off the washing machine onto the floor and Dane reaches out to steady him.

“Whoa. Shit.” Lashing out, a hand thrown into Dane's face, not like Noah's trying to hit him, just a warning, frantic, frenetic, pawing. He's scared, which surprises Dane. He forgets how they look together, how people tend to react to Ivy.

“Find something to put on him,” is all Ivy says, and Dane's looking around for a shirt or a coat or something to throw over Noah's skinny naked torso, and it's probably no good trying to convince him to come with them but Dane figures they can trick him easily enough. He's at least half tripping, lying on his side again, sprawled across the washer and dryer and shaking with silent laughter, and there's a folded blanket on the shelf next to the detergent that looks fairly clean and Dane picks it up and shakes it out and Ivy helps him wrap it around Noah, who seems to immediately lose consciousness as soon as he's covered up, like a parrot when you drape a towel over its cage. Really this couldn't be easier, he doesn't protest, doesn't fight at all, is limp in Dane's arms as Dane and Ivy lift him onto Ivy's shoulder and as soon as he's steadied there, held firmly in a fireman's carry, the three of them ascend the stairs again. 

Ivy has to stop and set down his burden and rest a few times on the way down the hill to the car, but they make it, there's no one trailing them, no sounds of distant shouts, no gunshots or dogs barking, and Dane opens the car door and helps Ivy ease Noah's sleeping body down onto the back seat, still wrapped in his blanket. Dane unrolls one of his stolen sleeping bags and spreads that over him as well, and he goes on sleeping, the headlong heedless sleep of someone who's fairly used to being drugged into submission, and it is a little sad when you think about that but Dane chooses not to dwell on it. However Noah's been treated by the man who owns him, it doesn't matter anymore, he's free.

“How does he drive with one arm?” It's the next morning, somewhere out in the middle of some godforsaken expanse of cornfields, when Noah speaks again; late morning, beautiful out here, blue skies and birdsong and emerald green stalks of corn waving gently in the breeze. Ivy takes no notice of him, but Dane figures it would be impolite not to answer his question.

“He's pretty good at managing with one arm. He's been like that since he was a kid.”

“So who are you anyway? You guys are friends with Andrew, right?” Dane's slightly taken aback by this, but tries not to let it show. There's this lissome young beauty curled up in the back of the car with Dane's sleeping bag around his shoulders, the stolen property of a serial killer or a drug lord or any number of other things he definitely doesn't want to fuck with, and there Noah goes with the blithe assumption that Dane and Ivy are cut from the same unscrupulous cloth, when really they've never done anything more illegal than petty theft (a lot of it, in Dane's case) and this ill-considered rescue mission. Breaking and entering. Noah doesn't even seem to notice when Dane doesn't answer him, just goes right on talking in a kind of senseless circular way, rattling along like this is a monologue he's been rehearsing for months alone in his basement prison. Andrew, that's his sugar daddy's name; Andrew's an asshole, Andrew's a decent guy, Andrew was nice to him and bought him stuff and kept him shackled to the bedpost with a bicycle chain and fucked him until he couldn't see straight. Ivy still doesn't appear to be listening, except maybe his brow is a little more furrowed than usual, his mouth slightly turned down at the corners.

Dane drives through Nebraska, endless mind-numbing stretches of sunbaked nothingness, fields of corn, fields of grass, fields of dry brown dust, windmills turning listlessly under the flat blue sky, not so much as a single cloud to relieve the desolation of endless light; he finds himself longing for nightfall, anxious as it appears to make Ivy when the sun goes down and they have to find someplace to hide themselves and the car until it comes up again. Ivy continues to staunchly ignore the sex slave, or whatever he is, an old divorced guy's living blow-up doll, really Dane shouldn't think such uncharitable thoughts about him but he has to be kind of stupid, doesn't he, he must have known what he was getting into and Dane's seen his type before. Pretty girls and boys who think they're invincible in the armor of their smooth-fleshed straight-toothed conventional attractiveness, that they're automatically in control of whatever situation they find themselves in, that their looks have made them master manipulators and the world is putty in their hands.

The reality, as Noah must be realizing, is somewhat different. Noah talks quietly but constantly as the miles roll by, and Dane listens to him to avoid falling victim to highway hypnosis. Small towns, greens and fountains and war memorials, more windmills, winding streets full of stately homes and cool shade trees. How much Dane would've loved to call any one of these houses his home, even the worst of them, even the one that's falling down, with the collapsing porch and boarded-up windows, even the one with a giant pit where the lawn should be and part of the roof missing, he finds himself wondering about them, all these houses, wondering who let them fall to ruin like this when somebody must have loved them once, when somebody must have given all they owned to ascend the front steps and walk past the porch swing and unlock that front door between the two Doric columns and know that they were home.

Noah's chattering is mostly nothing, uninteresting, indictments of Andrew's character and mentions of other men he's known over the years, other places he's been, speculations as to where certain of his associates are now, and a long boring story he keeps returning to and elaborating on about the night he lost his virginity to his Canadian half-brother. Dane just keeps nodding and grunting, making sympathetic noises when he suspects it's appropriate.

“So this one night, I didn't suspect anything was different, I thought it was just, like, well I don't know what I thought, basically everything was normal and I'd heard Kiya talking about some kind of a deal but I didn't pay that much attention, she and her bitch boy were always talking about stuff like that, and I used to hide in my closet and listen to them fuck because I was that bored, but I wasn't bored enough to listen that closely to all this shit about some guy from down South who had a bunch of really good weed, like the kind you can't even grow up there because of the climate and stuff, and she was gonna buy it off him and solve a lot of problems at the same time, and that sounded like maybe she wasn't talking about money but I didn't get it at the time. Anyway a few hours later Rodrigue knocks on my door and he's fucking got a bottle of champagne under his arm and a bunch of scented candles and shit and I'm like what the fuck's going on and he's like didn't Kiya tell you, and I'm like no, obviously she never tells me shit, but Rodrigue was like, he'd always wanted to bang me and now this would be his last chance. Which I thought was weird, because I didn't know I was going anywhere, but I'd always kind of wanted to bang him too and I was a virgin at that point so I figured, better get it over with, right, nobody's going to be as nice to me as my half-brother is--”

“What.” Dane keeps his eyes on the road, deliberately, obsessively, reading every street sign, studying every tree and telephone pole, anything to keep from accidentally looking at this nympho mental case in the passenger seat. “He's... he's related to you. You grew up with him, he's like functionally your brother, why would you think...”

“Well yeah, we knew each other. I didn't want to lose my virginity to some guy I didn't even know. Someone who didn't care about me.”

“What about your sister's boyfriend?” Noah pauses, seems to give this a great deal of thought, as if he doesn't realize Dane's being sarcastic.

“That prick? He was a total asshole and I hated even looking at him, but even besides that, he was female at birth. Like me. Weird but Kiya didn't know that when she met him. Anyway just grinding pussies together isn't good enough, I wanted to get dicked.”

“That's kind of...” There aren't enough words in the English language to explain how much Dane doesn't want to be having this conversation, but Noah takes his trailing off as an excuse to describe, in gleeful and excruciating detail, the momentous occasion of his first dicking. Apparently after that he was traded to this Andrew guy for drugs, and he and his brother-lover never saw each other again, which doesn't seem to Dane like such a tragedy.


	3. I, Said the Ox

“So you’re not from around here.”

“What?” Dane jerks out of his daydreams to the unwelcome realization that Noah is talking to him again, or rather talking at him, that way he seems to have of yammering on without noticing or caring if anyone’s paying attention. They’re three days out of Le Claire, heading west through the eerie corn-planted blankness of Iowa, endless repeating vistas like something from a video game, cut-and-pasted code, he’d swear they’d passed that barn already, that silo, that field, that highway rest stop, fucking christ does this state go on forever… Three days of squinting into the unrelenting sunlight and rattling along in the slow lane while eighteen-wheelers blow past and set the Golf rocking on its absurdly dainty tires. Three days, and Noah’s hardly shut up the whole time, but Dane’s getting pretty good at tuning him out. This must be what Ivy does, he figures, and Dane’s ability to sever the connection between his ears and his brain isn’t quite that advanced, but since they picked up Noah he’s gotten a hell of a lot of practice.

“Not from here. Whatever bumfuck state this is.”

“It’s Iowa. And no.” Unwisely, Dane glances over at Noah, who’s leaning back in the passenger seat with his bare feet on the dashboard, idly itching his crotch. He’s ditched his canvas trousers for a pair of Dane’s grudgingly lent underwear, which fit him surprisingly well in the waist but cling obscenely around his thighs, and his legs are pale and bristly but still long and neatly muscled and gorgeous and Dane can feel his brain start to shut down every time he looks at them, feel himself reverting to some previous incarnation of humanity, some early hominid whose only priorities are hunting and fucking and hunting down things to fuck and Noah’s legs are like a white flag of surrender, a sleekly drawn map to the moist pink treasure that lies between them, a cordial invitation to Dane’s boner.

Not that Dane has a boner, he’s much more evolved than that, and anyway pussy doesn’t do anything for him, or at least it shouldn’t. And it doesn’t, really, except in that knee-jerk mammalian way, there’s something about Noah that speaks to that part of him that knows his true purpose is to propagate the species but Dane as always chooses not to listen.

“So you’re… where are you from? Like back East somewhere?”

“New York.”

“City?”

“State.”

“You don’t have that goofy accent.”

“Thanks.”

“What about him?”

“Him?”

“The big guy.” Noah gestures over his shoulder at Ivy, who’s folded double on the back seat, his big body wedged into as small a space as possible, fast asleep with his arm thrown over his face. He seems to sleep enviably well like that, uncomfortable as it looks, and Noah’s looking at him oddly now, somewhat warily, as if Ivy’s some kind of sleeping beast of prey that he’d be wise not to wake.

“I don’t know. I really haven’t known him that long.”

“So you’re not… not related or anything? I thought maybe he was your dad or something.”

“No you didn’t.”

“Well, he’s old enough, isn’t he? But you’re a ginger, and he’s...” Noah keeps watching Ivy, twisted around in his seat clutching the back of it with both hands, and when Dane looks closely he sees that they’re trembling. Fear or fatigue or something else, he doesn’t know, but Noah actually manages to shut up for a while and every time Dane glances over at him he’s still looking at Ivy like he’s hypnotized, like a mouse facing down a swaying fang-toothed cobra, like he’s too afraid to turn his back on Ivy again even though all Ivy’s doing is sleeping, occasionally making a soft grunting noise and twitching a little but mostly just lying there looking dead to the world and not remotely threatening, in Dane’s opinion, but then he’s used to Ivy by now and particularly used to watching him sleep.

“I don’t know.” It occurs to Dane that he doesn’t know exactly how old Ivy is, but he can’t be much over 30, his face is lined in a few places, enough to look distinguished but not really wrinkled, the skin under his eyes is taut and his forehead is smooth and his hair is dark, almost black, without the slightest trace of any lighter color, at least none that’s detectable to the naked eye.

“He’s not, like… you’re not fucking him, are you? You don’t belong to him?” Dane isn’t sure how one of those things necessarily follows from the other, but he denies both, and searches the horizon for a gas station while he gives Noah a simplified explanation of how he and Ivy met and what got them to this point. Ivy rising from the dead, Jim inviting Dane to his room, all the prayer circles, the meetings, the hand-holding and singing. Vivian, his generous gift of the car, the debt that Dane owes him.

“He said he was from your hometown, he knew you, and he wanted me to… he said you couldn’t live the way you were living anymore, you needed someone to get you out.”

“I could’ve left. If I wanted to. I did it before.”  
“You went back?”

“Yeah. Andy needed me. He was really lonely without me.” Dane lets that one slide, and continues to sneak surreptitious glances at Noah, while Noah continues to watch Ivy sleep like he’s an animal at the zoo, a tiger maybe, cramped and snoozing in a tiny cage.

“He’s really not that ugly like this. When he’s asleep.”

“Mhmm.”

“I mean usually he’s pretty hard to look at, right? Don’t you think he’s fucked-up looking? Like, poor guy, I’m sure it’s congenital or whatever, it’s tough being handicapped and shit obviously, but jeez.” Noah whistles lowly, and Dane’s seized with the urge to slap him upside his supernaturally gorgeous face. Not that he should necessarily give a shit if people think Ivy’s ugly, it’s not like Ivy needs Dane to defend his honor for Christ’s sake, he has the air of a man who’s long since come to terms with his lack of conventional beauty, if he even ever noticed it in the first place, and in Dane’s opinion that just makes him more attractive.

“Congenital.”

“Yeah, like birth defects or whatever. That’s why he’s missing an arm, right?”

“Actually I think he was in a car accident.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah.”

“Shit.”

“Mhmm.” Dane returns his full attention to hunting for a gas station, and Noah miraculously shuts up, and for the next four or five miles nothing happens. Then Dane pulls into a rest stop and Noah hops out of the car and sprints toward the restroom, and Ivy keeps right on sleeping, and Dane rifles through his own pockets and then Ivy’s and then the glove box and the center console and under the seats and disbelievingly counts his last three remaining dollars over and over again, hoping like hell that some magic will happen and they’ll start multiplying.

“Shit,” he mutters. Obviously this was going to happen, but he’d thought they’d at least be able to get out of Iowa before he had to start turning tricks for spare change. Which was fine back East, or at least it was manageable, but he has the impression that people have different ideas about that sort of thing here in the Bible Belt and he stands a pretty decent chance of getting the shit beat out of him if he happens to casually proposition some cowboy in a truck stop men’s room. “Shit, goddamn, fuck.” He riffles through those last three bills one more time, then folds them back into his pocket. No miracle is forthcoming; it’s time to go fishing.

The first guy offers him twenty bucks for his mouth, and Dane sucks him off in the handicapped stall, kneeling on the grimy tile, acutely conscious of the fact that these are his only pants. The second guy wants a handy, but he wants Dane to touch himself too, which is somewhat annoying, but for another twenty he obliges. Any more than that, he figures, would be pushing his luck, so he gets the hell out of the bathroom with his hard-earned cash and pulls the car around to the gas pumps with Ivy still passed out in the back and Noah in the passenger seat; Dane hadn’t been expecting him to, but he’s returned like an obedient dog, is sitting there patient as anything, digging grime out from under his fingernails with a pen cap.

“You hungry?” Dane asks him. Not that he’s feeling especially generous, but he assumes it wouldn’t exactly be fulfilling the terms of his bargain with Vivian if he let the bitch starve to death.

“What did you do?” Noah says, so quietly that at first Dane isn’t sure he’s actually heard anything. “Did you do something gross for that money?”

“None of your business. You’re broke, aren’t you? You want to eat or not?”

“I guess I have to.” Dane snorts, and leans into the backseat to wake Ivy up. He swats him lightly on the shoulder a few times and the big guy blinks and lifts his head and stretches, and the corners of his mouth pull up in a weird brief little smile when he sees Dane looking at him. Noah’s looking too, but not as brazenly as he was before, now he’s just kind of sneaking backward glances, trying to be stealthy about it, still acting like Ivy terrifies him on some level which Dane elects to find amusing.

“Dinner.” Dane waves his last twenty in front of Ivy’s face, and Ivy gets the message. Dane holds on to the money, despite Noah’s whining, and orders a burger and a large plate of french fries and three glasses of water (unlimited refills) at the diner adjacent to the rest stop. Ivy doesn’t eat much, but Noah polishes off at least half the fries and fills his pockets with sugar packets and little plastic tubs of jelly, and he insists on switching places with Ivy when they get back to the car and falls asleep almost immediately, his face pressed against the window, stentorian snores and the occasional trickle of drool issuing from between his parted lips. Now it’s Ivy’s turn to watch him, and he does, just as intently, seeming about as wary of Noah as Noah is of him, which doesn’t make any sense. He poses no threat to Ivy, seems almost comically harmless slouched there in the back seat of the car, sleeping like he’s been injected with a powerful sedative, his shirt riding up and his shorts riding down, all his soft parts vulnerable and exposed. Thighs, belly, throat, all slightly plumped in repose and seeming very smooth and touchable, and once again Dane feels like he’s getting an unnecessary boner.

“He’s all right like that,” he says, just to say something, anything, to break Noah’s sleeping-nymph spell. “When he’s unconscious.” Ivy nods, and quirks his lips up in that brief smile again, and Dane wonders if he’s thinking about fucking Noah, if what he’s really been dreaming of all this time, on the road and in the car and back at the compound, alone in his narrow bed in the pantry room they’d shared, is a nice wet pussy stroking his cock and a pair of tits to stick his face in. Noah wouldn’t let him, Dane tells himself, Noah’s terrified of him, and he feels a little guilty for taking pleasure in that. Obviously Noah would never let Ivy touch him, so there’s no reason to be jealous.

It’s three nights and several truck-stop liaisons later when Dane finally figures out what’s going on with Noah and Ivy. The last few guys have been generous, these truckers seem to make decent money and not be opposed to using it to deflect loneliness, and so the three of them are staying in a motel with a pool. The room has a queen-size bed with musty linens, a TV that doesn’t work, matted wall-to-wall carpeting, and the most disgusting shower that Dane ever hopes to inflict on himself, he’d almost prefer not to use it but he’s so grimy and caked with dried sweat that he figures he at least won’t get any dirtier under that nasty corroded faucet, so he showers and lies down for a quick nap and when he wakes up Noah and Ivy are nowhere to be seen. It’s sunset and the air conditioner is rattling listlessly, it’s still too hot in the room and the ceiling fan is ineffectual and there appears to be no way to adjust the thermostat, and Dane moves the curtain aside and looks out the window towards the parking lot and the pool and he can hear the distant sound of splashing but there’s a wooden fence hiding the water and the pool terrace from his view. He doesn’t have any swim trunks and he doesn’t really like appearing in public in the altogether but he puts on his cleanest pair of shorts and goes out there anyway, and as soon as he swings open the gate leading to the pool terrace he knows he’s about to see something he doesn’t want to see.

Noah and Ivy, they’re the source of the splashing noises, they’re out here together, standing in the shallow end, Noah bent over the edge of the pool and Ivy fucking him from behind. They grunt in rhythm, their wet bodies move together, Noah’s hands are splayed on the concrete and there’s water dripping from his hair and shoulders and tits and forming a puddle underneath him as he writhes back and forth, thrusting himself back against Ivy, who’s got his hand on Noah’s hip holding him in place. They’re humping like animals right here in public, Noah’s naked and Ivy’s got his shirt on and his gas-station shorts slipping down his thighs, and there’s the pair of underwear Noah borrowed from Dane sitting discarded on the edge of the pool.

“Oh my god,” Noah’s saying, “shit, you’re really good at this, you like-- god, you like fucking me don’t you, god you feel good in my pussy, I’m gonna fucking come all over that fucking giant cock, please baby, keep on fucking me just like that, oh christ I’m gonna fucking come…” Silence from Ivy, or near enough, just some low grunts, and he fastens his mouth to the back of Noah’s neck, not really nibbling on it or kissing it like a normal human would do but more just holding it with his teeth, and the more Noah cries out the harder Ivy leans into him and then he collapses on his front with his legs still splayed and just lies there shuddering bonelessly like a hooked fish and making airless gasping noises, and that’s about when Dane turns tail and runs back to the room, practically sprints, drawing a few weird looks on the way, an old guy in a lawn chair with a cigarette butt in his mouth turning to glance at him with an expression of genuine concern which strikes him kind of funny, and by the time he bursts into the room and flops down on the bed he almost wants to laugh. It’s funny, right, this whole thing, thinking he can woo Ivy or whatever, showing up with the car, picking him up off the highway, driving him as far as he can from Jim’s brand of salvation, he’d been actually worried about Ivy and wanted to save his life but he was never without ulterior motives, he’d be lying if he didn’t admit that mostly what he wants is to fuck him, and now Noah’s gone and done that for him.

He hasn’t eaten dinner but he’s too unsettled to be hungry, and he wishes he could do something more interesting than lying here feeling betrayed and waiting for Noah and Ivy to come in from their little pool frolic, but every time he thinks about getting up and finding some food or an ice machine or something to read or even fiddling with the TV he gets overwhelmed with a weird kind of despair, like nothing he does can possibly matter if Ivy doesn’t want him. Which is stupid as fuck, of course, Ivy’s just one weird giant guy, he’s not Dane’s only option, but Dane has spent a great deal of time with him and gotten used to having him around and the thing is on top of having pretty hair and nice eyes and lips and a stupidly amazing body he’s also just really good company. He just sits there contentedly, like a dog, occasionally nodding his head or grunting in agreement, there’s just so much acceptance and empathy radiating from him at all times that it makes Dane a little bit dizzy.

Dane isn’t like that, he can’t accept people so easily, which is just one of the reasons why it would suck to have Ivy taken from him. He’s met very few people he’s willing to deal with for any length of time, and what passes for Noah’s personality is already starting to grate on him. For one wild moment he entertains the idea of heading north again and dropping Noah off at the compound, letting Jim and Vivian take care of him, but having Ivy to himself again isn’t worth the guilty conscience, not even Noah deserves what happens when someone like Jim sinks his claws into you, the robes and the prayer meetings and the faith circles, the clandestine after-hours meetups with the great man in his chambers… though, to be fair, Noah’s already used to being drugged and taken advantage of by older men, and with his misplaced faith in his own powers of manipulation, who knows what kind of mess he’d make of Jim’s carefully assembled house of cards.

It’s a while before Ivy and Noah come back, and they’re still wet and disheveled, Noah’s wearing one of Ivy’s undershirts and it’s sticking to his damp torso and showing off his nipples which can probably be seen from space at this point and he looks like he’s sort of walking with a limp which is at least a little impressive. Dane unwisely allows himself to think about that, how Ivy’s dick is apparently that big, how he appears to have no compunctions whatsoever about tearing into Noah with all his strength, fucking him until he can’t even walk straight, and it’s not that Dane wants Ivy to fuck him like that, no, a little finesse and less brute force would do him just fine, he’s not like Noah, he’s not a slut who gets plowed in public by men he’s known for a matter of days, but the truth of the matter is Noah has what he doesn’t, Noah’s gotten what Dane’s been dreaming of, and there’s nothing he can tell himself to make that stop hurting.

“Hey, Red.” Noah strips off the undershirt and tosses it on the bed, and he’s got Dane’s shorts on again, and it’s impossible not to note that his ass fills them out a lot more than Dane’s ever did. He and Ivy both have that cartoony and kind of paradoxical body shape, broad shoulders and narrow hips and generous amount of ass, though in Ivy’s case it looks like most of it is muscle. He has long smooth haunches like a racehorse, purely utilitarian, simple machinery engineered to maximum efficiency in driving the great pistons of his legs; it’s weird, Dane thinks, for a body that looks like it was built to move, this one spends a lot of time sitting absolutely still.

“Hey.” Dane glances at Ivy, whose face, as usual, gives nothing away. He doesn’t look guilty, and Dane feels guilty for wishing he would because it’s not like the guy’s cheated on him, it’s not like they mean anything to each other, and Noah looks as smug as the proverbial cat that got the canary which leads Dane to suspect that he knows what this means. Maybe that’s his game, establish dominance by taking what he knows Dane wants, mark the territory, make it nice and public. Or maybe he’s just weirdly compelled to sleep with men who scare him, maybe he thinks he deserves it, like he’s doing penance for running out on his sugar daddy.

“You mind if I… I’m gonna lie down, is that all right, I’m real tired.” Noah yawns and stretches his arms above his head, showing off his tits, which are marked with light but unmistakable bruises that look like the imprints of teeth, the nipples red and swollen like someone’s been sucking on them. He moans softly when he lies down, and Dane imagines the feel of cool sheets on warm sensitive skin, how he must be sore from all that rough handling, he can practically feel it himself, the low soothing throb, each heartbeat a reminder, the pain pulsing through him, hot and dull…

“Hey you. Red.”

“What?” Dane’s kind of surprised he’s able to speak at this point, and unsurprised that his voice came out sounding so peevish, but Noah doesn’t seem to care that he’s being barked at, apparently Ivy’s dick has the power to put him into a state of drugged serenity where all he’s capable of doing is lying flat on the bed with his arms at his sides and mumbling requests for Dane to come over here and rub his back, which Dane is not going to do.

“Come on. Just… do it, rub it for me. Just a little, I’m sore.”

“I bet you are.” At some point Ivy’s disappeared and Dane almost doesn’t care, he’d rather not look at him right now, again for reasons which aren’t Ivy’s fault but Dane’s prepared to forgive himself for being irrational in this situation. He feels as if the only thing he’s ever truly wanted has been forcibly taken from him by the damp half-naked slut currently planted in the middle of his bed, leaching pool water into the mattress, and he knows it would be unfair to lay into Noah for this and he hardly ever gets the urge to slap the shit out of someone who’s never even physically harmed him but fucked if that isn’t all he can think about now, and Noah’s still wearing Dane’s underwear for christ’s sake, his plump white ass bulging out of them, looking soft and defenseless in repose, and Dane can practically feel his palm stinging from the vicious slaps he can imagine laying down right there, right where Noah’s round ass cheeks peek invitingly from the leg openings of Dane’s boxer briefs.

“Yeah,” Noah agrees. “Not as young as I used to be, I can’t do that shit to my back. Like, fuck, you hear that, it’s my goddamn spine saying fuck you. And I scraped the shit out of my hands too. On the concrete. Should’ve put a towel down or something.”

“Shut up,” Dane mutters, but Noah doesn’t hear him, and eventually just to have something to do he relents and comes over and sits on the edge of the bed and presses his fingers into Noah’s back, and the sounds that come out of him are very similar to the ones he made when Ivy was going to town on him, exuberant gasps and groans, high-pitched screams of delight when Dane digs his thumbs in under his shoulder blades and works them back and forth, and Noah arches his back in ecstasy and then collapses back onto the bed and Dane realizes that he’s starting to get a boner, which is confusing because he’s definitely still pissed off.

“Wow. Wowee. Like, holy shit. You ever try that?”

“What?”

“The big dude. You ever take that dick out for a spin, cause, man, you should try it. You like getting fucked up the ass, right?”

“None of your business.”

“Easy, Red. Nothing to be ashamed of, baby.”

“Please for the love of god don’t call me baby.”

“Yeah, whatever.” Noah laughs, or more accurately cackles, and flings one arm up in the air as he flops over onto his back and he’s all flushed and damp, still wet from the pool, spikes and whorls of dark hair plastered to his forehead and Dane’s noticed that his armpits are completely hairless like they’ve been lasered clean which isn’t so far out of the question, he’s sure that Andrew guy could afford that kind of maintenance, and he’s seen enough to suspect that Noah’s pubic hair has suffered the same fate.

“Why’d you do it?” he asks, quietly, not really expecting an answer, and for a while Noah’s just quiet, shivering silently, one wrist resting across his eyes as if shielding them from the dim light of the dusty overhead lamp which is filtered through generations of filmy scum and dead moths, and then Noah brings his wrist to his lips and he’s chewing on it distractedly and Dane wonders why the hell they’re both here in this room, why he thought this would be an improvement, he should have stayed with Jim who didn’t really kill Ivy, Ivy would have made his way back and they would have been together again, sleeping in that same small room hardly ever speaking but occasionally holding each other in the middle of the night and it’s about time Dane admitted that that’s the best he can hope for.

“Why did you fuck him, Noah? What’s in it for you?”

“Christ. Should I draw you a diagram? The man’s got a huge dick. Quid pro quote, end of discussion. Huge fuckin’ dick. That’s what’s in it for me.”

“Do you just not have any self-respect? You barely know him.”

“Slow it down, Red. Does it matter? We did the whole dance, I got him to fuck me, I don’t regret it, he doesn’t regret it. He’s down the hall getting ice right now,” Noah says, as if in answer to a question Dane hasn’t asked. “I said I was thirsty. I need a glass of ice water. God. I’m sweating like a pig.” Noah rolls onto his side again, his back turned to Dane, and there doesn’t seem to be any more to say and Dane is kind of relieved. No one’s done anything wrong, as usual the person he has most cause to be pissed at is himself. Ivy wouldn’t take advantage of Noah, and Noah… well, Dane has no idea what Ivy likes, and this could very well be it. Tall, willowy, pretty face, perfect skin. There probably aren’t a lot of guys who wouldn’t fuck Noah, when you get right down to it, any skittishness about non-traditional approaches to femininity notwithstanding.

“What about you, Red?” It’s been long enough since the last time either of them said anything that Dane’s actually startled when Noah speaks again, and he’s still facing the other way but Dane kind of prefers that, he’d rather not look at that devastatingly symmetrical face, those full pouty lips that are the literal reason collagen fillers exist, because God neglected to bestow on most mortals the gifts that He, for some reason, gave Noah. It often strikes Dane how arbitrary it is, how some people are chosen to be beautiful and others just aren’t, and he’s always pretty much thought he didn’t give a shit if he was good-looking or not but now the slow gnaw of jealousy’s started, he can’t help but wish he had Noah’s magnetism, his grace, his striking coloration-- the bright black of his hair, the rosy white of his skin, the golden green of his eyes which actually appear to be brown until the light hits them in just the right way, enough subtlety that the whole effect isn’t garish.

“What about me?”

“You into sloppy seconds?” Noah rolls over to face Dane again, purses his plump lips, makes kissing noises, and Dane feels heat creep up the back of his neck and into his ears and spread across his face, pretty soon it’s like he’s burning up, he’s a mass of sweat and nerves and vague irritation, this is all Noah’s fault, everything, everything that’s ever happened, and Noah can’t be allowed to… he can’t just… Dane won’t stand for this, that’s all. He won’t allow Noah to seduce him, he won’t admit that that’s even a possibility.

“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.”

“Not remotely.” Noah blinks his luminous eyes, brushes a charmingly errant curl off his forehead. “You want some of this action, it’s yours. Course I don’t think I’ll even feel you in there after the goddamn ferocious dicking I just got from your buddy, but you seem like a guy who enjoys a challenge.”

“Look, I… wow, no thanks. No offense. You’re really… obviously you know you’re really hot. You are. Like. I mean, you are hot, but no thanks.”

“What’s the matter? You’re not scared, are you?”

“Scared of what?”

“I dunno, lots of gay guys are scared of pussy. Like they think it’s a monster that’s gonna swallow them whole or something. It’s great though, you’d like it if you tried it. Or hey, you can always fuck me up the ass if you want. That’d be fun.”

“Come on… really, I don’t want to… seriously, I don’t mean this in a bitchy way, but it’s not going to work. I don’t want to fuck you, I just want to go to sleep.” This is absolutely true, Dane’s exhausted from being on the road all day, he still does most of the driving because Ivy’s eyesight isn’t the greatest and obviously they can’t trust Noah with the car. He remembers that night he came back from Jim’s private quarters, the night Ivy came and settled down next to him and held him, how warm it was, how reassuring, how Ivy’s touch was able to quiet his mind, how easily he fell asleep after that.

“Suit yourself, boss. You might wanna move when the big guy comes back, I’m pretty sure he’s gearing up for round two.”

“What?”

“I’m gonna get him to fuck me again. You probably want to not be in the bed when that happens.”

“I’ll sleep on the floor. Gladly. I’m overjoyed.” Dane gathers up the musty cigarette-burned quilt and drags it into the corner of the room, and Noah tosses him a pillow, and he busies himself getting comfortable on the floor and wondering how things went so awry. He seems to have become a third wheel awfully fast, and maybe he should’ve insisted on keeping the bed, let Noah and Ivy fuck on the floor if they absolutely have to fuck, but he feels like he doesn’t have it in him to be that petty.

Ivy returns with the ice, and Noah welcomes him with open arms and legs, and for the next twenty minutes Dane lies still and listens to their clandestine humping. It’s touching that they’re at least making an effort to be quiet, he appreciates that, but he’s still seething with jealousy and it’s not that the floor is uncomfortable per se but he’s the one doing all the goddamn driving, isn’t he, he needs his rest, he should at least get to sleep on a bed in the motel room he paid for with the money he earned doing unsavory things in truck stop rest rooms. It pisses him off no end that Noah thinks he can show up and just casually demote him like this, but at some point Dane realizes he’s getting kind of hard lying here listening to Ivy’s heavy breathing and Noah’s stifled squeals of delight. He can’t possibly jerk off now, it’d be way too weird, but how many times has he imagined Ivy breathing like that, grunting and panting like he’s about to blow his load, and if he closes his eyes and touches himself it’s almost like Ivy’s fucking him instead of Noah and it feels absurdly good to get a couple of fingers in his ass and grind down on them, poor substitute for that reputedly huge dick but it’s all right as long as he gets off. 

He imagines it’s Ivy waiting for him in the bathroom stall, sitting on the toilet with his shorts around his ankles, all the grimy tile and graffiti and everything smelling like bleach and piss and Dane kneels to suck the dick that’s offered to him, he can almost feel it between his lips and he adds his own noises to Noah and Ivy’s and when he comes he pictures the sweaty wad of bills, Ivy as the faceless john folding money into his palm.


End file.
